The original intent of this site was to gather and share materials to be used in musique concrète compositions. These are examples of the sort of work I’d hoped the site would encourage.

Song 01 for Joseph B Strauss

A mixture of sound created from the statue of Strauss at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. It turns out the software I am using tries to turn anything into beats and notes. I ran the discussion Jacob and I had with the Schertler mic attached to JB’s statue—Interview with Joseph B Strauss—through Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Performer, inadvertently generating the two MIDI lines used in this work. The MIDI loops were fed to two different digital synths in the studio, creating marimba, piano, and bass tracks. The left-to-right rolling “tympani” are actually nearly raw bridge material. That’s the first suspender on the southeast approach, with a low-pass filter applied to reduce wind noise.
Download the fileCreative Commons License

Song 02 for Joseph B Strauss

More of the same MIDI technique. This song is a bit of serendipity that occurred during a break from the tedious work of extracting sound samples to load into the Roland V-Synth. Three one-minute samples from Golden Gate Bridge Assay 2 were used to generate the MIDI tracks, which were applied as loops to the studio synths with different voicings. There are two takes of three MIDI voices mixed to stereo. The four resulting tracks were then aligned and bounced to a single stereo track.
Download the fileCreative Commons License

Raga for Joseph B Strauss

The sampled rolling thunder sound of the Golden Gate Bridge main cable is juxtaposed with a Yamaha S80 gamelan ostinato and run through Reason’s Thor, also triggering NN19 synths. My search for stochastic Nirvana continues…
Download the file
Creative Commons License

Notes on licensing

Audio files on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

When I created wikiGong, I meant to keep the licenses of samples and derivatives open and to frankly discourage use of the creative commons “NC” tag. However, as remixing became more popular—as well as more lucrative, for some—NC was retained by most platforms as an option, while “SA”—which prevents NC from being added to derivatives—fell from favor and support.

I’ve come to understand through this that most remixers will not touch a sound that prevents them from prohibiting commercial use of their own derivative work by anyone else. And I’ve decided that—in most cases—I’d rather have my source used than spurned for that reason.

So I am re-releasing the majority of my own sound files featured on this site under (CC BY 4.0) terms. For work removed to other sites, such as freesound.org, I tag the files with the closest native equivalent. That means derivatives may be licensed (CC BY) or under more restrictive terms than their sources, such as (CC BY-SA) or even (CC BY-NC).

The three files here, however, are offered as originally intended: (CC BY-SA) 2010, 2020 D A Ayer. They can be remixed freely, but the commercial use of derivatives downstream cannot be limited by the user. You can make money off your derivative work, and you don’t need to share the proceeds; but you can’t prevent remixers downstream from following suit. That’s always seemed fair to me.

That said, if you do re-use the work, please comment with a trackback to your new composition to announce what you’ve done. We moderate all comments daily and will be happy to link back!

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